Hey that cool retro look: a proof concept

Let’s go rhetorical question mark on this … Webdesign and graphic design do share some common grounds (how blatantly obvious) when it boils down to grid design, laying out content, mixing it with photography and adding typographic elements, don’t they? But this way of doing it, the whole birth of industrial design education, graphic design, advertising, photomontage and photography as we know it, was done by experiment and put to the test by some great people of the early 20th century, the pioneers of graphic design. Marinetti (The futurists, Italy), Alexander Rodchenko, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Their influences are still remarkably visible in todays graphic and webdesign despite the digital age bringing new production techniques.

The cover of You Could Have It So Much Better by Franz Ferdinand (2005) in the style of Russian avant garde was influenced by this 1924 portrait of Lilya Brik by Alexander Rodchenko.

Dave Shea’s own submission for CSS Zen Garden entitled Blood Lust is inspired by the Italian Futurists which broke with the past totally, admired the industrial revolution, using wild typography: words in freedom.

Alexander Rodchenko and Constructivisme

In the Sovjet Union around the beginning of the 20th century the Russian Constructivists came to the scene, progressive artists wanting to redefine their roles in society and make social engaged art, striving towards a universal formal language. They used printing and photography as means to convey universal messages to be readable for all people. ((back then, lots of people couldn’t hardly read or write anything.)

The original Lilya Brik by Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) is one of the leading and most influencial personalities that breaks in 1921 with traditional painting. His heavy compositions are filled with squares, rectangles, big arrows, exclamation signs, mostly 2 color-prints, photo-collages and the use of typography layed over the photos and background, unusual perspectives and abrupt cuttings opposite the traditional ways. The slogans have no imagination, they are only purely informative. The photo-mechanization revolution made large scale production possible, therefore, also enabled distribution to the masses.

In his later life he would be rejected by Stalin because his art leaned to much to Western Imperialism and therefore ideologically corrupt. Ironically enough, the typical ‘Rodchenko’ esthetics would be pursued in the Stalinist photographical propaganda.

Lazslo Moholy-Nagy and Das Bauhaus

Bauhaus was a very famous school for arts in Germany lead by Walter Gropius (1883-1969). One of its most influencial personalities was Lazslo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a pioneer and leader in the world of graphic design and publicity, a great admirer of the russian constructivists and the Dutch movement De Stijl.

He would call Rodchenko’s combination of photos and typography ‘typo-photos’. His thought was to create a geometric formal language opposite the traditional ideas that defined art and being thaught at the early Bauhaus. His Telefonbild EM2 was a statement that using machines is in the spirit of our technological age. Following his principles about lay-out: the essential is conveying a message through expressive typography. Design is limited to triangles, squares, circle shapes.

In his last book Vision in Motion, published in 1947, he describes using quotations to replace images ’so text becomes illustration’.

Porting back to the future: web design

1. The essence of Moholy-Nagy’s graphic design - the constant sliding back and forward between text and image, between editing and designing. Webdesign is equally a multi-disciplined craft using plural techniques: text editing, imagery, sound, animation which follows Moholy-Nagy’s legacy that was to avoid the narrowing of experience through single-minded professionalism and careerism by encouraging the mastery of all techniques towards uninhibited plurality and imagination. Most importantly, he taught people to think - that designing is a euphemism for thinking, and that “man, not the product, is the end in view”. (Stuart Bailey, arts journal Dot Dot Dot.)

2. A informative website conveys its message universally and clearly with typographical (text) and/or graphical (images) means. Rodchenko used now known as sans-serif types which are especially suitable for headings. Webpages use sans-serif fonts to style H1, H2, …, H5, H6. In CSS that would be:

h1 {font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;}

The use of collage techniques is still very prominent today. Also Construction (Rodchenko, constructivisme) was understood as organization of elements stressing the visual stability of form. Spatial objects in order to represent the very basic ideas of structure, to show solid links between the elements. In CSS, We make use of padding, margins, floats, positioning and other to control just that.

3. Information design is a mark-up of the information I interchange. A meta-information: information about information, that enables to recognize relations, like linking the content. The visuality of the meta-information is very important for the readablity, the patterns as well as the bits of the presented information.

Resources:

More info about Rodchenko

More info about László Moholy-Nagy

good interview - Erik Spiekermann - typography and design today

updated article on resources, conclusion (see 3.) - 27.04.2006, 30.04.2006

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